


The Start of Something New

by miniconsuffrage



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Beast Wars
Genre: Awkward Crush, BWRarepair2018, Cheetor loses consciousness in front of cute people, Multi, Polyamorous Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 15:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16519214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miniconsuffrage/pseuds/miniconsuffrage
Summary: Growing up in a war zone isn't easy.





	The Start of Something New

**Author's Note:**

> BW Rarepair Week Day 1 prompt: New
> 
> Yes i am incredibly proud to be the first one in this ship tag and No i will not apologize for titling this fic after a high school musical song

It was after Silverbolt punched him in the face, twice. After Blackarachnia comes to live with them permanently—or at least, they all hope it’s permanent. After Cheetor’s confusing and turbulent upgrade to Transmetal 2. After all of that, but before the end.

There were these moments.

“You doing alright, kitty cat?” Blackarachnia asked. For nano-klik, it looked like she was standing on the sky. Then Cheetor realized it was he who was upside down.

“Uh... yeah?” he ventured, then remembered what had happened. He’d been practicing a cool new move with his rockets outside on his time off, and he hadn’t expected anyone to suddenly appear. Especially not Blackarachnia. He must have crashed and lost consciousness for a moment, because he certainly didn’t remember ending up in a tree.

 _Nice going, Cheetor. Very cool,_ he berated himself. “How long was I out?” he asked as he extricated himself from the tree.

Blackarachnia watched him with a bemused expression, her arms crossed over her chest. Cheetor didn’t see a camera, but he still got the feeling she was cataloguing this for future blackmail. “Just a klik or two,” she said.

Cheetor shook stray leaves off of himself and transformed back to root mode. “It, uh... it was going really well before you showed up,” he said, trying to sound like he believed it. “Just a little something to drop on the Preds.”

“Right,” she said. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m sure crashing into trees will be real helpful in a battle someday.”

“You know I’m older than you, right?” he asked. Anything to change the subject.

Blackarachnia snorted. “Call me when you start acting like it,” she said, and turned to walk back to the ship.

“Uh.” Cheetor tried to come up with a response, but his processor was frozen and entirely uncooperative. He didn’t come back to his senses until she was long gone, and by then it was too late to salvage any part of the situation. He’d made a fool of himself and could barely understand why it had happened.

That wasn’t fair, though. Blackarachnia had that effect on people. For all he knew, she did it on purpose—the point was, it wasn’t his fault if he sometimes didn’t know what to say to her, or if she sometimes made him feel weird. He’d brought it up to Rattrap once, just in a general way, with no names named, and Rattrap had just made fun of him. So that was off the table.

It didn’t matter. It was normal.

But then...

They were in the middle of a fight, and Cheetor was locked in a wrestling match with Quickstrike. The guy was small, but the snake teeth were dangerous, and he was pretty trigger-happy. Not that Cheetor was _struggling._ It just took him a cycle or two to dispatch the Predacon and get a look at what was going on on the rest of the battlefield.

And the first thing saw when he did was Silverbolt, who was struggling with Dinobot II. As Cheetor watched, Silverbolt dodged laserfire, kicked one of Dinobot’s legs out from under him, avoided getting speared by Dinobot’s tail, and then _picked the Predacon up over his head_ to toss him at a rock.

Cheetor’s optics went wide as he watched. It was one of the coolest things Cheetor had seen lately.

Just then, of course, Silverbolt turned to look at him, and his expression morphed from exertion to concern. “Cheetor, look out!” he shouted.

Cheetor turned, just in time to see Rampage behind him. That was the last thing he remembered for awhile.

When he came to, he was lying on the ground, looking up into Silverbolt’s concerned face. “You’re awake!” he declared, relief evident in his voice. “How are you feeling?”

“Uh… not great,” Cheetor admitted. He was very much in pain. It was quiet, he noticed—the noises of battle gone. “What happened? Where is everyone?”

“Optimus and the others went to follow the Predacons. I volunteered to stay behind to make sure you were alright,” Silverbolt said.

“Oh,” Cheetor said eloquently. They probably needed the numbers, but Silverbolt was here with him instead of helping the others fight. “I’m good. You can go.”

Silverbolt cocked his head to the side. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “Can you make it back to the Ark on your own?”

Cheetor very much wanted to be able to say that he could, and to demonstrate it as truth. He pushed himself to a seated position, and that went alright, but anything beyond that was out of his power. His whole frame was seized with pain, and he found he couldn’t support his own weight on his arms in order to stand. Rampage sure had done a number on him.

“Please don’t do that,” Silverbolt said, putting a hand on Cheetor’s shoulder to keep him from moving further—not that Cheetor really wanted to, at that point. “Alright. I’ll take you back to the Ark and get you in a CR chamber.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Cheetor protested. “You need to get back to the others and help them fight. You can just leave me here and pick me up later.”

Silverbolt shook his head. “You’re losing too much energon. I’m not going to leave you here, defenseless.”

“I can still shoot,” Cheetor muttered, although with the way he was feeling right then, who knew how his aim would be.

In response, Silverbolt held up Cheetor’s smashed gun—it looked like it had been stepped on, and was completely unusable.

“...Oh,” Cheetor said. That was sad. He liked that gun. Hopefully Rhinox would have the time to make him a new one soon.

“Are you ready to get started, or do you need a little bit more time to rest?” Silverbolt asked.

Honestly, Cheetor didn’t feel great about the prospect of standing up, but he wasn’t going to say that. “We can go now,” he said.

Silverbolt helped Cheetor up, wrapping an arm around Cheetor’s waist and pulling one over his own shoulders so that he was taking most of Cheetor’s weight. Even with all that, Cheetor was in pain. He tried to shove it back down and not outwardly react. “We aren’t flying?” he asked.

“Dinobot wrecked one of my wings,” Silverbolt admitted.

That would do it. “We’ll get him next time,” Cheetor said. He felt a pang of sadness, then—it still hurt, thinking about the loss of _their_ Dinobot—but it was quickly replaced in his processor with physical pain.

They went at a slow pace. Cheetor felt like he was practically being dragged along, no matter how much he tried to help, and the more he did, the more it hurt. Added to that, he could feel a drip of energon coming from his side and running down his leg, and while he hadn’t found the nerve to look down at the wound yet, it wasn’t a good feeling.

Finally, he could stand it no more. “Can we stop for a klik?” he gasped out.

“Of course,” Silverbolt said quickly, and seated the two of them on a nearby outcropping of rock.

Cheetor took a few moments to regain himself. Sitting definitely helped. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“Do not apologize. You can tell me whenever you need a break,” Silverbolt said firmly.

He didn’t let Cheetor go. Instead, he kept a firm grip on him, and then... Then, he stretched out his good wing to cover Cheetor, almost like a shield.

Suddenly, Cheetor was very aware of where exactly he was, what exactly he was doing. His spark started to whir faster in its casing, which... was weird. Cheetor wasn’t used to feeling like that. But it distracted him from the pain, and that was something.

He had to stop twice more before they reached the Ark. Silverbolt did the same every time, and once they made it, he made sure Cheetor was safely inside the CR chamber and healing before he left again to rejoin the rest of their team.

Silverbolt was a good friend, Cheetor decided. He appreciated the other Maximal’s concern. And that was it.

Then.

They had some downtime. The Predacons were being quiet, which was never a good sign, but there wasn’t much they could do about it besides keep an eye on the situation. And Rhinox had that covered at the moment.

That left Cheetor to his own devices. The Ark was huge, and there was a lot to explore. They’d all gotten stern lectures on how they shouldn’t touch anything, because any alterations to the ship could change the timeline in unpredictable ways—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t _look._

He hadn’t expected to run into any friends on this particular trek, but sure enough, while flying into one of the rooms he’d never been in before, he found two. There was a big computer console covering one wall, and seated atop it were Blackarachnia and Silverbolt, looking at something on the screen.

They turned at the sound of the door opening. “Cheetor! Come sit with us,” Silverbolt called, and Cheetor saw no reason not to. He transformed when he landed and took a seat on the console behind them. “What are you guys doing?” he asked.

“We found some pictures stored on Teletraan-1,” Silverbolt explained. “I know we aren’t supposed to touch anything, but we’ve already been using Teletraan-1, so I believe it can’t hurt.”

“I guess not,” Cheetor said, staring up at the screen in wonder. Now that he knew what he was looking at, he almost couldn’t believe it. It was an image of Cybertron like he’d never seen it before—long before his time, and even before the Great War, it looked like. He couldn’t see any rubble, only huge old buildings lit up and brilliant. “That’s amazing.”

“It’s alright,” Blackarachnia conceded. Silverbolt flipped to another image, this time of Cybertron’s moon in the distance. That was more familiar. The light coming from the moon contrasted with the darkness of space and the little dots of stars scattered throughout sent a pang of homesickness through him.

“Is this what Cybertron looks like now?” Silverbolt asked.

For just a moment, Cheetor didn’t understand the question. “Oh yeah! You guys have never been there,” he remembered. “It’s pretty different. The whole problem was the energy crisis. They’ve rebuilt a lot of it in the last few hundred years to be more efficient, and to work with bots our size. There’s still plenty of spaces that haven’t been touched since the war, though. Not enough time and resources.”

Silverbolt went to another picture. This one had been taken during the war—just after a raid, by the looks of it. The photographer was on the street, in the midst of the rubble and destruction. Cheetor had seen pictures like it from the sky, but it felt completely different to see it up close and personal like that. “It still looks like that?” Blackarachnia asked, unimpressed.

“Well… some of it does, I think,” Cheetor said. “Nobody ever goes to those parts, though.”

“I bet I could find some good stuff there,” she mused.

“I would prefer you didn’t,” Silverbolt said. “Or at least take me with you. Those buildings don’t look very stable.”

She gave half a shrug. “It’s not like we’re ever going to get there.”

“We aren’t gonna be stuck here forever,” Cheetor frowned.

“And what makes you think that? You figured out a way off the planet yet?” Blackarachnia asked.

“Well, no…” Cheetor trailed off. _He_ hadn’t, but someone would. He was confident in that. If they didn’t, well… Then they would be there when the Autobots and Decepticons awoke, and then Cheetor would have been able to read about himself in the history texts. Wouldn’t he? That hadn’t happened, so they must figure it out somehow.

The next picture was one Cheetor instantly recognized. “Six Lasers!” he grinned. “It got destroyed in the war, but they rebuilt it afterwards. It’s pretty much the greatest place in the universe!”

“What... is it for?” Silverbolt asked, peering at the image.

“Fun! There’s roller coasters and games and all kinds of other rides,” he said. “When we get back to Cybertron, I’ll take you both. It’ll be great, you’ll see.”

Silverbolt smiled at him. “Well, I’ll look forward to it,” he said.

They flipped through more pictures, and Cheetor pointed out all the places he recognized, and told them what he knew about them. As they went, Cheetor made note of the things each of them seemed most interested in, and tucked that information away for later. He would take them, he vowed to himself. As soon as they got back to Cybertron, he would show them everything he loved about the planet, and hopefully they would love it, too.

It was a nice thought. It made his spark feel warm. It felt…

.... _Huh_. Well. That was new.

“Earth to the pussycat,” he heard.

“Huh?’ Cheetor asked, suddenly realizing the both of them were staring at him.

“Are you alright?” Silverbolt asked. “You...zoned out.”

“Yeah, I’m good,” Cheetor said quickly. “Sorry, I just—I got kinda distracted. Where were we?”

Their gazes lingered on him for a moment, and the weight of them felt so much heavier than they had a moment ago. Finally, they redirected their attention to the next picture, and Cheetor tried to join them rather than focusing on the very big problem he now had.

Or… Or maybe it didn’t need to be a problem. This was okay, he told himself. Lots of people got crushes on friends. Probably? Anyway, he was having fun with them. That could be it. It didn’t have to be a big deal.

And if it ended up being one later, well… Cheetor would deal with that later. For now, they had a war to win.

And, more immediately, pictures to look at. Cheetor could focus on those for now.

**Author's Note:**

> [here's](https://miniconsuffrage.tumblr.com/post/179757334783/the-start-of-something-new-miniconsuffrage) a tumblr link to this fic if you want to reblog it! and [here's](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/167626) a pillowfort link!


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